What is Design?

What is design? – This has been a very much debated topic for long, as design has different connotations in different fields for eg. Architecture, Landscape design, textile design, handicraft etc. but for a short answer to this question you might consider this – Design is the means by which we order our surroundings, re-shaping natural materials to suit our needs and purposes. It arises at the interface between humankind and raw environment and expresses human intentions, desires, and hopes.

Another answer for the question is that it is a road-map or a strategic approach for someone to achieve a unique expectation. It defines the specifications, plans, parameters, costs, activities, processes and how and what to do within legal, political, social, environmental, safety and economic constraints in achieving that objective.

Related: What is architecture? What does it look like?

More on What is Design?

The evolution of the human race depended on our developing successful ways of relating to our environment. Our brain evolved a special intelligence that enables us to plan and apply techniques for dealing with specific challenges posed by the natural world.

‘What is meant by designing, is it something big, how did it evolve and is it actually required?’

In early times we learned to make tools and other equipment to hunt, to cook, to protect ourselves, and to make possible increasingly sophisticated ways of living. All of our artifacts, from flint implements to temples, bridges, and cities, and, in our own time, to computers and spacecraft, reflect that special kind of constructive intelligence we call ‘design’.

Design involves altering the forms of existing materials to make them suitable for what we want them to do. People being swept away by a flood may respond immediately by grabbing hold of a floating tree to save themselves. Design begins when we foresee that we will need a raft or, better still, a boat, and work out how to make one. Click here to know more.

All design has four aspects: materials, real objects which we choose, change, and combine by processes, giving them new forms that we conceive to fulfill our purposes.

Also Designing is a very important part in architecture, and all other forms of art, and even other sciences and different fields of engineering like automobile designing etc.